Photo of the edible life stage (the sporophyte) of the alga Cladosiphon okamuranus, from Wikimedia Commons, under BY-SA 3.0

The Cladosiphon okamuranus S strain genome assembly and gene models have not been determined by the JGI, but were downloaded from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) on October 31, 2019. Please note that this copy of the genome is not maintained by OIST and is therefore not automatically updated. In order to allow comparative analyses with other algal genomes sequenced by the JGI, a copy of this genome is incorporated into PhycoCosm. The JGI Annotation Pipeline was used to add functional annotation to this genome.

Cladosiphon okamuranus is an edible brown algae (seaweed) known as Okinawa mozuku that is cultivated specifically for human consumption. Aside from its culinary usage in Okinawan cuisine and elsewhere C. okamuranus is a source of the pharmaceutically important compound fucoidan (Lim et al. 2019) and additional commercially viable products such as alginates (Nishitsuji et al. 2016). Seaweeds such as C. okamuranus are ideal as food, and due to rapid growth and the ability to capture carbon dioxide, together with low cost of cultivation are potential inputs to various biorefinery processes leading to extraction of commercially valuable compounds and biofuels (Vigani 2020).

Four strains (S, K, O and C) of C. okamuranus are distributed around the Okinawa prefecture with different morphological and genomic characteristics (Nishitsuji et al. 2020).